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Sociology of Music (Sociology)

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Jul 18th, 2017
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  1. Introduction
  2.  
  3. Music is central to cultural life and therefore also often perceived as central to social life. The study of music in society has been of interest to canonic social thinkers, including Weber, Simmel, and Adorno, since the establishment of sociology. The study of music has also concerned scholars in adjacent disciplines, particularly musicology, cultural studies, and economics. In the landmark Distinction, Bourdieu argued, “nothing more clearly affirms ones ‘class,’ nothing more infallibly classifies, than tastes in music” (Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste [London: Routledge, 1984], p. 18). Sociologists of music have accordingly been concerned with the importance of musical taste for signifying status and distinguishing cultural hierarchies. Sociologists have also been concerned with the socio-demographic correlates of musical preference, how musicians and the music industry organize to provide music and influence taste, and the education and working conditions of musicians. What tends to distinguish sociology of music from other disciplines is a commitment to the sociological imagination or the use of social research methods—but not necessarily both. And many sociologists of music work across disciplines. Sociologists have also coalesced around the study of different genres, and those contributing in the sociology of particular genres often do so not as sociologists but as music, folklore, or history scholars whose interests have extended to the sociology of music. The American sociology of music tradition has arguably been influenced more heavily by symbolic interactionism and rational choice theory than the European, where critical theory has been more influential. Nevertheless, conceptual and methodological interchange is growing, particularly with the increasing influence of Bourdieu in US sociology. The sociology of race, gender, and sexuality has also influenced the field significantly. This conceptual and methodological diversity means the field has low paradigmaticness. However, this diversity does lead to productive exchange and synthesis of ideas and methods. Notably, there is growing interest in music as a social technology and insights from science and technology studies. As in cultural sociology more broadly, attention is turning to “the music itself,” music as mediating social interaction, and artists and works embedded in wider socio-musical systems using computational tools, particularly network analysis. Data proliferation is generating innovative quantitative work. Qualitative research is also being reinvigorated by new technologies enabling new interview methods, digital ethnography, and computational methods for processing textual data.
  4.  
  5. General Overviews
  6.  
  7. A sociology of music tradition can be traced back to the birth of the discipline, although single works providing a comprehensive overview of this tradition are relatively few. The field exists because methodological sociology offers a distinct perspective on how music is created, received, and used in everyday life. The contributions of Weber, Simmel, and Adorno (see Classical Sociology) established a sociological pedigree for the subdiscipline. From the United States, Howard Becker began publishing on musicians in the early 1950s (see Music and the “Art Worlds” Perspective). Bourdieu’s place in the canon is assured, although his best-known analysis of music is based on data now half a century old (Bourdieu 1984). There was rapid increase in academic interest from the late 1970s and the publication of Becker’s Art Worlds in 1982. Bringing occupational and organizational sociology into the sociology of popular music, Richard A. Peterson demonstrated the internal logic of cultural production in terms of risk and reward (see Anthologies). The work of Peterson and Kern 1996 on omnivorousness also generated a rich empirical research agenda in the area of taste, consumption, and participation. Together, Becker, Bourdieu, and Peterson have made programmatic statements dominating the discipline, if not individually achieving dominance or providing general overview. Disciplinary fragmentation and the penetration of other disciplinary approaches have been noted by Shepherd and Devine 2015 and by Marshall (see Sociology of Popular Music). Nevertheless, useful and compelling overviews of the subdiscipline do exist. Martin 1995, although disavowing any claim to providing a comprehensive sociology of music due to the inchoate nature of the field, does present an authoritative definition of the sociology of music and an account of its evolution. Shepherd and Devine 2015 fills a notable gap in providing exhaustive coverage of both classic statements on the sociology of music as well as contemporary empirical and conceptual studies. DeNora 2000 has established a case for “music sociology” and researching music as a social force. Roy and Dowd 2010 also provides an exhaustive introduction to the contemporary literature.
  8.  
  9. Becker, Howard S. 1982. Art worlds. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press.
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  11. Jazz musician and Chicago School sociologist Howard Becker analyzes art worlds as involving collective action on the part of producers and consumers. Amidst a varied career involving the study of deviance, work, methodology, and art, relatively little of Becker’s published output is purely about music. While this addresses the arts in general, it provides case studies from a variety of musical genres and a conceptual framework that has influenced sociologists of music.
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  13.  
  14. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. London: Routledge.
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  16. A tour de force in the “grand theory” tradition, this is one of the 20th century’s most important sociology texts. Based on empirical research conducted between 1963 and 1968, this text argues that occupational status, sociocultural taste, and practice are closely associated (although eschewing strong causal explanations) and predictable from members’ economic, social, and cultural capital. More broadly, Bourdieu argues that cultural capital related to musical taste and knowledge reinforces economic and social capital, social reproduction, and inequality.
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  18.  
  19. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. The field of cultural production: Essays on art and literature. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.
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  21. A collection of ten essays on art, literature, cultural works and the importance of culture for intellectuals. Field is conceptualized as the social space where agents—producers and audiences—take different positions that should be understood in relational terms. Art works are endowed with symbolic value through restriction and sacralization on the part of producers. Increasingly influential among sociologists interested in the production of music who reject a purely economic paradigm.
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  23.  
  24. DeNora, Tia. 2000. Music in everyday life. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  25. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511489433Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  26. Draws on ethnographic evidence from four different settings and interviews with fifty-two British and American women. Assesses the affective and embodied aspects of music and analyzes music as an independent force in structuring women’s inner and social lives.
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  28.  
  29. Martin, Peter J. 1995. Sounds and society: Themes in the sociology of music. Manchester, UK: Manchester Univ. Press.
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  31. First major monograph-length work written in English on the sociology of music: its production, distribution, and consumption. Sympathetic to interactionist approaches and interprets the creation and performance of music as essentially collaborative. Challenges the dichotomization of the subdiscipline between those concerned with “musical meaning” and those with “music in social context,” by highlighting the inadequate treatment of meaning on the one hand and tendency to treat society as a black box on the other.
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  33.  
  34. Peterson, Richard A., and Roger M. Kern. 1996. Changing highbrow taste: From snob to omnivore. American Sociological Review 61.5: 900–907.
  35. DOI: 10.2307/2096460Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  36. Seminal paper advancing a “highbrow omnivorousness” hypothesis, challenging the then-orthodoxy that elite and lowbrow cultural forms were socially incompatible and introducing the concept of the “cultural omnivore.” Analyzing the 1982 and 1992 waves of the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, they found that those who consume the “high” arts tend to consume a wide variety of popular culture rather than eschewing the tastes of the less advantaged.
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  38.  
  39. Roy, William G., and Timothy J. Dowd. 2010. What is sociological about music? Annual Review of Sociology 36:183–203.
  40. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.soc.012809.102618Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  41. Comprehensive overview of the sociology of music, considering how it is particularly sociological. Reaffirms music as involving activity and interaction rather than existing as an object. Reviews the literature on musical meaning and music as a technology of the self and establishes the unique importance of music for both social differentiation and integration.
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  43.  
  44. Shepherd, John, and Kyle Devine, eds. 2015. The Routledge reader on the sociology of music. London: Routledge.
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  46. A recent anthology of central source readings for student sociologists of music serving as the first such edited collection. Selections from Spencer, Simmel, Weber, Adorno, Susan McClary, Pete Martin, Lisa McCormick, Andy Bennett, Peterson, Marion Leonard, William Weber, and Sara Cohen. Also provides an incisive account of the evolution and current state of the subdiscipline, identifying a shift to mixed-method approaches, the rise of digital humanities, and reaffirmation of the “sociological imagination.”
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  48.  
  49. Reference Works
  50.  
  51. Notably, there is no single journal for sociologists of music, although the major sociological journals provide coverage of the sociology of music, and the journal Poetics also provides a hub (see Journals). This may accordingly explain the importance of reference works, edited collections, and special issues of journals for the subdiscipline.
  52.  
  53. Bennett, Andy, and Steve Waksman, eds. 2015. The SAGE handbook of popular music. London: SAGE.
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  55. Authoritative and wide-ranging collection, with thirty-five chapters covering theory and method, business history, music and cultural history, economics, technology, and embodiment.
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  57.  
  58. Dowd, Timothy J. 2007. The sociology of music. In 21st century sociology: A reference handbook. Vol. 2. Edited by Clifton D. Bryant and Dennis L. Peck, 249–260. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
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  60. An important overview in focusing attention on music as work, on the contribution of organizational sociology, and a conceptualization of field as both genre and distribution.
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  62.  
  63. Anthologies
  64.  
  65. The sociology of music features a number of edited collections and anthologies by subject leaders, bringing together both leading scholars and empirical contributions by early-career researchers. Such collections serve a useful function in a field lacking a central scholarly journal in making available a highly diverse set of empirical studies of particular music scenes. The following comprise a set of recent collections. Baker, et al. 2013 provides a critical engagement with the “musical mainstream.” Bennett and Peterson 2004 uses the concept of “scene” to organize a diverse set of empirical studies of different music genres. Bennett, et al. 2005 provides a set of classic readings in popular music studies; Frith 2007 does likewise from his own body of work. Horsfall, et al. 2014 comprises classic extracts alongside contemporary ethnographic studies of sixteen genres, thereby providing readers with an overview of American popular music. Hesmondhalgh and Negus 2002 also aims for broad coverage of both concepts and genres in their collection. Crossley, et al. 2015 investigates a range of music worlds using the concepts and techniques of social network analysis.
  66.  
  67. Baker, Sarah, Andy Bennett, and Jodie Taylor, eds. 2013. Redefining mainstream popular music. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
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  69. A collection of seventeen essays probing the concept of the musical mainstream, with chapters on gender, sexuality, technology, and authenticity.
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  71.  
  72. Bennett, Andy, and Richard A. Peterson, eds. 2004. Music scenes: Local, translocal and virtual. Nashville: Vanderbilt Univ. Press.
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  74. An engaging collection of papers on a variety of scenes including jazz, blues, rave, riot grrrl, goth, and anarcho-punk, as well as the various online and offline settings where scenes take place. Edited by leading sociologists of culture, contributors include Howard Becker, David Grazian, and Melanie Lowe.
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  76.  
  77. Bennett, Andy, Barry Shank, and Jason Toynbee, eds. 2005. The Popular Music Studies reader. London: Routledge.
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  79. A wide selection of articles, many classics, by Susan McClary, Dai Griffiths, Sarah Thornton, Tia DeNora, Paul Gilroy, Paul Théberge and other central popular music scholars, covering issues including technology, gender, diasporas, sexuality, and everyday life. From a variety of disciplinary perspectives, the reader documents the evolution of popular music to its early-2000s stage of stylistic fragmentation, globalization, and proliferation.
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  81.  
  82. Crossley, Nick, Siobhan McAndrew, and Paul Widdop, eds. 2015. Social networks and music worlds. London: Routledge.
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  84. Edited collection summarizing a series of social network analytic and quantitative studies of different music worlds, including punk, rap, folk, classical, jazz, and feminist DIY music in a variety of local and national contexts. With a comprehensive introduction to the method targeted at interdisciplinary scholars researching music, this argues the case for social network analysis as an interpretive tool for the social scientific study of music.
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  86.  
  87. Forman, Murray, and Mark Anthony Neal. 2004. That’s the joint! The hip-hop studies reader. New York: Routledge.
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  89. A substantial and relatively early example of hip-hop studies, concerned with broader hip-hop culture as well as rap music. A large selection of classic and academically significant contributions to the field, from notable hip-hop scholars including Tricia Rose, Cheryl Keyes, Todd Boyd, and Greg Dimitriadis, as well as scholars from the “subcultures” perspective such as Dick Hebdige and Paul Gilroy.
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  91.  
  92. Frith, Simon. 2007. Taking popular music seriously. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.
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  94. Frith is considered one of the leading sociologists in popular music studies, and this forms a collection of his most important journal articles.
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  96.  
  97. Hesmondhalgh, David, and Keith Negus, eds. 2002. Popular music studies. London: Arnold.
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  99. A heavily interdisciplinary and extremely diverse collection, with sixteen chapters ranging from dance music, conceptions of the mainstream, hip-hop, materiality, the concept of the “everyday,” calypso, salsa, Indian popular music, muzak, creativity, the rock aesthetic, black music in Japan, and Brazilian song.
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  101.  
  102. Horsfall, Sara T., Jan-Martijn Meij, and Meghan Probstfield, eds. 2014. Music sociology: Examining the role of music in social life. New York: Routledge.
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  104. Encompasses a range of ethnographic studies and literature reviews, including contributions from singer and actor Paul Robeson, Howard Becker, William Roy and Timothy Dowd, and Simon Frith, alongside studies of individual genres including heavy metal, Latino music, rap, jazz, Muslim American punk, and American folk. There is also a final section on industry trends, commodification, and downloading.
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  106.  
  107. Peterson, Richard A., ed. 1976. The production of culture. Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE.
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  109. The collection, together with its classic “prolegomenon,” focuses on how the symbolic elements of culture are shaped by the systems within which they are created and distributed. Challenged the then-dominant paradigm that culture and social structure mirror each other, in favor of a coherent approach to understanding how the expressive symbols of culture come to be created in a field of symbolic production composed of technology, law and regulation, industry structure, organization structure, occupational career, and market.
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  111.  
  112. Bibliographies
  113.  
  114. There are relatively few published bibliographies for the sociology of music, but the following are of note. The International Bibliography of Sociology includes coverage of music. Berger 2008 focuses entirely on monographs on rock. Both Honigsheim and Etzkorn 1988 and Groce 1992 may appear a little dated but are included here for historical interest.
  115.  
  116. Berger, Monica. 2008. Scholarly monographs on rock music: A bibliographic essay. Collection Building 27.1: 4–13.
  117. DOI: 10.1108/01604950810846189Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  118. An overview of scholarly monographs on rock from 1980 to 2008, with special reference to American scholarship in the area.
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  120.  
  121. British Library of Political and Economic Science. International bibliography of sociology.
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  123. Updated quarterly. An essential online resource for sociological research, with comprehensive references to journal articles and books dating back to 1951. Texts on the sociology of music fall within its remit.
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  125.  
  126. Groce, Steve B. 1992. The sociology of popular music: A selected and annotated bibliography of recent work. Popular Music and Society 16.1: 49–80.
  127. DOI: 10.1080/03007769208591464Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  128. Notable for referring to the sociology of popular music as “sociology’s forgotten stepchild.” Pays specific interest to growth areas since 1979: women in popular music, small-time and noncommercial performers, roles held by nonperformers, and music videos.
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  130.  
  131. Honigsheim, Paul, and ‎K. Peter Etzkorn. 1988. Sociologists and music: An introduction to the study of music and society. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.
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  133. Although slightly dated, this text originally published in 1972 includes a comprehensive 100-page bibliography first compiled by Honigsheim (b. 1885–d. 1963), a protégé of Weber, and updated in 1988 by Etzkorn.
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  135.  
  136. Journals
  137.  
  138. Articles on the sociology of music are represented in all the major sociology journals. The selection here focuses specifically on journals devoted to the sociology of music as well as musicology journals that have included sociological contributions. Poetics, a journal devoted to the quantitative study of culture, has hosted a number of special issues on the sociology of music. Cultural Sociology is currently edited by sociologists of music and has, in its short history, given good coverage to music. Popular Music is more open to a variety of disciplinary perspectives subject to contributions maintaining a focus on popular music.
  139.  
  140. American Music.
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  142. Quarterly journal established in 1983 concerned with American music and music in America.
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  144.  
  145. Black Music Research Journal.
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  147. Biannual journal established in 1980 concerned with the philosophy, aesthetics, history, and criticism of black music.
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  149.  
  150. Cultural Sociology.
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  152. Empirically oriented, quarterly British-based journal established in 2007. Includes a number of publications concerned with music. Special issues edited by Marco Santoro in 2011 and Nick Crossley and Wendy Bottero in 2015 devote considerable attention to the sociology of music: largely so in the former case, entirely so in the latter.
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  154.  
  155. Cultural Studies.
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  157. Explores the relationships between cultural practices, everyday life, material, economic, political, geographical, and historical contexts; aims to intervene in the processes by which the existing techniques, institutions, and structures of power are reproduced, resisted, and transformed. Established in 1987. Publishes six issues a year.
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  159.  
  160. Ethnomusicology.
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  162. Official journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology, established in 1957. Published three times a year. Focuses on theoretical perspectives and research in ethnomusicology, covering music in all historical periods and cultural contexts.
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  164.  
  165. Jazz Perspectives.
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  167. Journal aiming to bridge the jazz-as-music and jazz-as-culture divide and serve as a platform for historical, musicological, and cultural studies treatments of jazz. Published three times a year since 2007.
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  169.  
  170. Journal of Cultural Economics.
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  172. Official journal of the Association of Cultural Economics International published quarterly since 1973. Concerned with the theoretical development of cultural economics, applied analysis of culture, including music, and analysis of the economic aspects of cultural policy.
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  174.  
  175. Journal of Jazz Studies.
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  177. Formerly the Annual Review of Jazz Studies before an earlier incarnation in its current name, this journal has run with some breaks since 1979. Currently an online peer-reviewed journal published biannually by the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers. With a broad readership including jazz fans, its scope includes musicology, biography, and cultural critique.
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  179.  
  180. Media, Culture and Society.
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  182. Interdisciplinary journal straddling communication studies and sociology, established in 1979 with eight issues a year. Includes some articles on music.
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  184.  
  185. The Musical Quarterly.
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  187. Established in 1915, this journal is concerned with classical music, including many written contributions by composers. Nevertheless, it includes a useful section “Institutions, Industries, Technologies,” which analyzes how music is created and consumed. And it has also published pieces by social scientists.
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  189.  
  190. Poetics.
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  192. Interdisciplinary journal of theoretical and empirical research on culture, the media and the arts, keen to encourage papers oriented toward the mainstream of their disciplines, including sociology, psychology, media and communication studies, and economics. Relevant and impactful special issues devoted to music in particular include Peterson and Dowd’s Music in Society: The Sociological Agenda 32.3–4 (2004); Dowd’s Explorations in the Sociology of Music 30.1–2 (2002); and Tia DeNora and Robert Witkin’s Musical Consciousness 29.2 (2001).
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  194.  
  195. Popular Music.
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  197. Established in 1981 and published three times a year, including many stimulating articles drawn from diverse disciplines, covering a wide array of genres and musical contexts.
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  199.  
  200. Online Sources, Databases, and Data Sets
  201.  
  202. Numerous quantitative data sets have been collected, particularly in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and are increasingly being made available and easily accessible via online data centers for secondary analyses. Online directories and databases can also be searched for their own qualitative content or for data scraping. The following comprise a selection of data sets and databases relevant to sociology of music, as existing sources for prominent published work, or potential such sources. General social surveys are most useful for examining tastes and participation; directory and biographical data for examining the production of music; and streaming sources and audio platforms for both musical consumption and production. The US General Social Survey is a recurrent face-to-face survey of individuals in private households using an exemplary sampling design; on a number of occasions it has included items on cultural taste and participation, including music. The UK Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion survey fielded in 2003 has been used extensively by sociologists of cultural consumption and participation, and informed the design of the 2007 Finnish survey, “Cultural Capital and Social Differentiation in Contemporary Finland.” Directory sources such as the Lord Jazz Discography and Grove Music Online have been scraped to create quantitative data sets for insightful and innovative analysis by sociologist Damon Phillips and economist Karol Jan Borowiecki (see Production of Music). The possibilities arising from automatic data extraction of online music databases and directories are immense for sociologists and social scientists of music.
  203.  
  204. Bennett, Tony, Elizabeth Silva, Alan Warde, and Mike Savage. 2008. Cultural capital and social exclusion: A critical investigation, 2003–2005. UK Data Service. SN: 5832.
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  206. This is a 2003 survey involving a multistage stratified random sample of 1,564 respondents with an ethnic boost sample of 265. Follow-up interviews were conducted with twenty-nine respondents and fifteen partners. Twenty-five focus group interviews were also conducted and are available with the quantitative data set. Quantitative survey includes items on liking of eight musical genres and eight works of different styles. See also Bourdieusian Accounts.
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  208.  
  209. Christensen, Thomas. 2010. Eurobarometer 56.0: Information and communication technologies, financial services, and cultural activities, August–September 2001. ICPSR03363-v4. Cologne, Germany: GESIS.
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  211. Includes items on cultural activities: media consumption, Internet use, access to media including record and CD players, and the types of music listened to by respondents. Fielded to EU residents in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, with 16,200 in total.
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  213.  
  214. Davis, James A., Tom W. Smith, and Peter V. Marsden. 2014. General Social Survey, 1993, 1998, 2000, 2002. ICPSR35536-v1. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research.
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  216. The General Social Survey (GSS), conducted annually between 1972 and 1994 (except for 1979, 1981, and 1992) and biennially thereafter, collects information from the general public on a variety of subjects. The 1993, 1998, and 2002 waves included modules on the arts: on musical preferences and recreational activities (1993); on attendance, participation, and attitudes toward arts funding (1998); and musical preferences, attendance at arts events, and participation in artistic activities (2002).
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  218.  
  219. dbopm: The database of popular music.
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  221. A database of the genre from 1934 to the present, first published online in 2000. Searchable by song title, songwriter, recording artist, show, film title, and TV musical production. Includes 179,972 internal links connecting songs with artists.
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  223.  
  224. Discogs.
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  226. User-generated cross-referenced database of releases, artists, and labels. Includes data on catalogue numbers, companies, and images.
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  228.  
  229. Lord, Tom. 2005. The Jazz Discography by Tom Lord.
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  231. A definitive database providing information on over 42,800 leaders, over 212,600 recording sessions, over 1,200,000 musician entries, over 1,300,000 tune entries, and over 400,000 record releases.
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  233.  
  234. McDonald, Glenn. Every noise at once.
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  236. An online publication of an algorithmically generated scatter-plot of the musical genre space, based on data for 1,387 genres. Adjacencies are discovered rather than asserted via taxonomy. Underlying x-y data comes from audio analyses: a mixture of computational attributes such as loudness, tempo, and tempo consistency, as well as human-trained machine learning to identify danceability, energy, and valence. Genre-to-artist mappings are created using cultural data scraped from music streaming and social media sources.
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  238.  
  239. Mueller, Kate Hevner. 2015–01–23. American Symphony Orchestra repertoires 1842–1970. ICPSR35235-v1. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research.
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  241. Sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Indiana University Foundation, this data set is the result of thirty-two years of data collection by Kate Hevner Mueller and John Henry Mueller alongside Elizabeth Kirkpatrick Vrenios, Ann Louise Davidson, and Mr. and Mrs. Robert Griffith. The study catalogued the repertoires of twenty-seven major symphony orchestras in the United States from the 1842–1843 season through the 1969–1970 season, including the length of the pieces performed, the composers, and their nationalities.
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  243.  
  244. National Endowment for the Arts. 2014. Survey of public participation in the arts 1982–2012. ICPSR35596-v1. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research.
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  246. Combined file aggregates SPPA data from 1982, 1985, 1992, 2002, 2008, and 2012. The 1997 SPPA was excluded because its design was too different. Respondents were asked a core set of questions about their participation in and attendance of jazz music, classical music, opera, and musical-related events alongside other cultural practices. The combined file has 97,295 cases and eighty-five variables.
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  248.  
  249. Office for National Statistics. 2005. ONS Omnibus Survey, attendance and participation in the arts module, November 2002 and February 2003. UK Data Service. SN: 5066.
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  251. Focuses on participation rather than listening or preference; includes items on attendance at classical concerts, jazz, world music, opera, or other musical concerts, as well as playing of musical instruments. The module continued through 2004 and 2005 with additional data sets available via the UK Data Service.
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  253.  
  254. Opening Night!.
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  256. A cross-index of data for over 38,000 opera and oratorio premieres, originally presented in the database first entitled, “From Don to Giovanni: Opera and Oratorio Citation Database.” Draws on an exhaustive list of directories as well as catalogues of national and copyright libraries. Is being updated periodically from its most recent launch in 2013 to add new premieres as well as any missed operas and oratorios.
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  258.  
  259. Operabase.
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  261. A large searchable database of artists and performances, searchable by composer, location, and date from 2014 to 2018. A subscription service enables searches back to the 1996–1997 season.
  262. Find this resource:
  263.  
  264. Oxford Music Online.
  265. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  266. The home of Grove Music Online, comprising the eighth edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, with sixty thousand articles written by over six thousand music scholars, as well as articles from Grove Opera and Grove Jazz. The recently published second editions of The Grove Dictionary of American Music and The Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments are being added continuously. A central and authoritative resource charting the global history and culture of music and musicians.
  267. Find this resource:
  268.  
  269. Savage, Mike, and Fiona Devine. 2015. BBC Great British Class Survey, 2011–2013. UK Data Service. SN: 7616.
  270. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  271. Includes items on liking and disliking of eleven different music genres. The data set combines a large nonprobability Internet sample (326,712 cases) and a smaller multistage random stratified sample (1,026 cases). See also Bourdieusian Accounts.
  272. Find this resource:
  273.  
  274. United Kingdom Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Taking part: The National Survey of Culture, Leisure and Sport.
  275. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  276. A major survey of cultural, leisure, and sports participation commissioned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Arts Council England, Sport England and Historic England. Running since 2005, with a longitudinal element added in 2012. Archived data sets are available via the UK Data Service.
  277. Find this resource:
  278.  
  279. Classical Sociology
  280.  
  281. The classical sociology of music is not definitive regarding whether the focus of study should be music and its social effects, or the social context of music. Classical sociologists have arguably focused more on the former. Weber and Simmel’s contributions are most notable for their primacy. Weber analyzed rationalization and the effect of economic growth on music (1921), and hoped to complete a sociology encompassing all the arts. This unfinished “music study,” published posthumously, is of renewed interest among sociologists with Darmon 2015 providing a close reading of its contribution as a historical, sociological, and comparative piece. Simmel’s contribution, made early in his career, considered the possible origins of music and music as communicating meaning. Despite scholarly interest in their work as early contributions neither are currently influential as sociologists of music, although their influence as sociologists on sociologists of music is palpable. Adorno’s extent and depth of contribution means his work remains more central, if contentiously so, and arguably as “music sociology” rather than sociology of music. This distinction has been reemphasized by DeNora, who diagnosed a disciplinary shift from interest in how music, ritual, and the arts foster social order to what “causes” the “music itself” (DeNora 2003). Adorno, who studied composition with Anton Webern, defined himself as a musicologist as well as a sociologist, and his commitment to modernist classical music shines through his critique of popular music. This concerned pre-1950s Tin Pan Alley products and forms, his musical weltanschauung formed before the emergence of rock and roll, modern jazz, or the widespread diffusion of serious traditional music. The rationalization and commodification associated with capitalism and economic growth, he considered, undermine “intrinsic” cultural value, with popular music inherently kitsch. Adorno’s work on music has been challenged directly on a number of grounds as pure critique, leaving little scope for sociological analysis and insensitive to the diversity and creativity of popular music in particular. The complexity and oppositionality of his style may also have limited his influence (Dowd 2007, p. 249 in Reference Works). DeNora has partially restored Adorno both for his fundamental recognition that music is not simply the product of economic forces and for his sociological imagination. She argues that rather than canonizing Adorno as a theorist, his insights can be drawn upon selectively to invigorate new theory (DeNora 2003). This program has been pursued to creative effect by both DeNora and Hennion in particular.
  282.  
  283. Adorno, Theodor. 1988. Introduction to the sociology of music. Translated by E. B. Ashton. New York: Continuum.
  284. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  285. Intended by Adorno not only as a statement on music sociology but also the sociology of the Frankfurt School more broadly. Delivered as a set of twelve lectures to the University of Frankfurt in 1961–1962. Critical essays on diverse subjects such as the work identities of orchestral musicians, listening, the function of popular music, opera, chamber music, and the social role of music critics.
  286. Find this resource:
  287.  
  288. Adorno, Theodor. 2002. Essays on music. Edited by Richard Leppert. Translated by Susan H. Gillespie. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
  289. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  290. A comprehensive collection of twenty-seven essays, with detailed annotations by Richard Leppert, demonstrating Adorno’s range of writing on music sociology. Twelve of these were appearing in English for the first time. Combining philosophy, cultural criticism, and sociology, Adorno’s critique of popular culture and defense of the value of serious contemporary music in the face of musical commodification continues to be highly influential. Even among those sympathetic to his message his interpretation is nevertheless contentious; however, among those unsympathetic he is impossible to ignore.
  291. Find this resource:
  292.  
  293. Darmon, Isabelle. 2015. Weber on music: Approaching music as a dynamic domain of action and experience. Cultural Sociology 9.1: 20–37.
  294. DOI: 10.1177/1749975513511789Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  295. Highlights Weber’s focus on the organization of the “sound material,” and music as a field of tensions driven by the inexorable logic of cultural change.
  296. Find this resource:
  297.  
  298. DeNora, Tia. 2003. After Adorno. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  299. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511489426Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  300. A reassessment of Adorno’s contribution to music sociology as well as an agenda for the future of the discipline. Advances an Adorno-influenced theory of music as social control, extending the theory in her 2000 text that music is a technology of the self.
  301. Find this resource:
  302.  
  303. Hennion, Antoine. 2015. The passion for music: A sociology of mediation. Translated by Margaret Rigaud and Peter Collier. Farnham, UK: Ashgate.
  304. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  305. A first English translation by the foremost French sociologist of music of La Passion Musicale (1993). An exhaustive guide to the differing traditions within the sociology of music alongside qualitative analyses of a range of musical phenomena. Draws inspiration from the entire tradition, incorporating musicology, economics and science and technology studies. Outlines a “sociology of mediation” with music comprising infinite mediations. This translation will ensure wider dissemination and prominence on Anglophone reading lists.
  306. Find this resource:
  307.  
  308. Simmel, Georg. 1968. Psychological and ethnological studies on music. In The conflict in modern culture and other essays. Edited by K. Peter Etzkorn, 98–140. New York: Teachers College Press.
  309. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  310. An early sociological study of music, first published in 1882 and submitted (though not accepted) as part of Simmel’s doctoral dissertation, and notable primarily for its primacy. Simmel interprets music as essentially communicative and an elaboration of verbal communication. Comparison of the musical life characterizing different countries provided what is arguably also an early example of ethnomusicology.
  311. Find this resource:
  312.  
  313. Weber, Max. 1958. The rational and social foundations of music. Edited by Don Martindale and Johannes Riedel. Translated by Don Martindale, Johannes Riedel, and Gertrude Neuwirth. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press.
  314. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  315. Published posthumously and in unrevised form, this is nevertheless an important landmark in the social scientific study of music. Weber attends extensively to the question of whether music is a legitimate object of sociological inquiry, and then to the question of the “rationality” of Western tonality in contemporary music compared with non-Western musical systems as part of a wider inquiry into the rationalization of music.
  316. Find this resource:
  317.  
  318. The Production of Music
  319.  
  320. Interest in production is shared by economists and economic sociologists, business historians, and critical political economists. The production of culture perspective has been primarily associated with Peterson; in addition to Peterson 1976 (see Anthologies) Peterson and Anand 2004 provides a distilled overview of his approach, with particular reference to technology, law and regulation, industry structure, organization structure, occupational careers, and the market as each having different effects on production. Intriguingly, they also apply this perspective to autoproduction: the production of culture by those consuming cultural products as a means to forming identity and meaning in their everyday lives. In this way, the authors integrate production and consumption approaches to culture. From an economic perspective, Baumol and Bowen considered the apparent perpetual financial crises of performing arts organizations in terms of a “cost disease” in a highly influential text that also noted the social objectives of arts organizations and the nonfinancial motives of artists. While many sociologists reject the concept of creativity as constructed to sacralize the “lone genius,” Cowen 1998 rehabilitated it through an examination of the relationship between markets and creativity, innovation and reception, a rehabilitation also argued for by Toynbee 2000 from a communication studies tradition. Cowen’s position is one of cultural optimism and that markets benefit cultural life. Timothy Dowd and Damon Phillips have both made notable contributions as economic sociologists. Lopes employs Bourdieusian analysis of periodical sources to trace the emergence of jazz as a serious art form. Phillips 2013 is a study of jazz city networks accounting for the rise and diffusion of a distinct genre in terms of the authenticity, credibility, and rarity values deriving from different positions in the global network. There are also contributions to understanding the social and economic factors that promote composition, paralleling work on the economics of invention (Scherer 2004; Borowiecki 2013; McAndrew and Everett 2015).
  321.  
  322. Baumol, William J., and William G. Bowen. 1966. Performing arts: The economic dilemma. New York: Twentieth Century Fund.
  323. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  324. A highly influential text forming the first serious economic analysis of the arts. This diagnosed a “cost disease” at the heart of the performing arts, whereby productivity growth in this sector lags that of the economy as a whole; accordingly, wage growth in the sector cannot match that for the economy as a whole leading to a growing earnings gap. Analysis of how the “cost disease” was treated by performing arts companies provided much inspiration to subsequent generations of cultural economists.
  325. Find this resource:
  326.  
  327. Borowiecki, Karol Jan. 2013. Geographic clustering and productivity: An instrumental variable approach for classical composers. Journal of Urban Economics 73:94–110.
  328. DOI: 10.1111/pirs.12078Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  329. A highly imaginative study of the careers and locations of 116 classical composers, proposing distance between birthplace and cluster location as an instrument for incidence of locating in a cluster. Predicts that location in a cluster led to a composer producing an additional influential work every three years. A model of how to gather and analyze historical cultural data where survey data sets and official statistics are unavailable.
  330. Find this resource:
  331.  
  332. Cowen, Tyler. 1998. In praise of commercial culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
  333. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  334. Eschewing a hard materialist approach, Cowen nevertheless presents a strong argument that markets matter for music, beneficial in generating innovation, freeing music creators from patronage, allowing consumers to explore their tastes, and allowing artistic niches to survive apart from the mainstream.
  335. Find this resource:
  336.  
  337. Dowd, Timothy J. 2004. Production perspectives in the sociology of music. Poetics 32:235–246.
  338. DOI: 10.1016/j.poetic.2004.05.005Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  339. An account of the “art worlds” and “production of culture” perspectives, clarifying the importance of industrial factors for music, as well as industrial organization insights for sociologists of music.
  340. Find this resource:
  341.  
  342. Lopes, Paul D. 1992. Innovation and diversity in the popular music industry 1969 to 1990. American Sociological Review 57.1: 56–71.
  343. DOI: 10.2307/2096144Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  344. Using exploratory time series analysis and a case study approach, argues that the oligopolization of the music industry in the 1970s and 1980s did not lead to a loss of innovation. Music majors increasingly functioned as finance and distribution arms of independent labels that operated in an “open” system delivering considerable diversity and novelty, including the movement of hip-hop and new wave as important new genres.
  345. Find this resource:
  346.  
  347. Lopes, Paul D. 2002. The rise of a jazz art world. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  348. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511489495Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  349. An exemplary sociohistorical study of the rise of jazz as a “serious” art form, drawing on jazz journals and other documentary sources from the birth of jazz. Lopes identifies the 1920s and 1950s as critical junctures: the former for jazz first being treated seriously by mainstream music critics, and the latter for the proliferation of modernist styles and emergence of a jazz “art world.”
  350. Find this resource:
  351.  
  352. McAndrew, Siobhan, and Martin Everett. 2015. Music as collective invention: A social network analysis of composers. Cultural Sociology 9.1: 56–80.
  353. DOI: 10.1177/1749975514542486Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  354. Framed in terms of the economics of innovation and social network studies, this paper analyzes 505 British composers born from 1870 as a whole network, identifying distinct communities associated with different musical movements. Models their composition output in terms of birth cohort, nationality, gender, and degree centrality.
  355. Find this resource:
  356.  
  357. Peterson, Richard A., and N. Anand. 2004. The production of culture perspective. Annual Reviews of Sociology 30:311–334.
  358. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.soc.30.012703.110557Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  359. While concerned with culture more generally, this review provides many examples from the sociology of music. An exhaustive overview of the literature employing the production-of-culture perspective, with culture understood as the outcome of organizational, institutional, and social arrangements.
  360. Find this resource:
  361.  
  362. Phillips, Damon J. 2013. Shaping jazz: Cities, labels, and the global emergence of an art form. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
  363. DOI: 10.1515/9781400846481Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  364. A fascinating book bridging organizational theory and cultural sociology using the techniques of social network analysis. Using formal methods, tunes are found to be re-recorded more often either when credible by dint of association with a city that is known for its vibrant jazz culture, or by being difficult to categorize. An impressive study generating insights on both the creation and reception of music.
  365. Find this resource:
  366.  
  367. Scherer, Frederick M. 2004. Quarter notes and bank notes: The economics of music composition the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
  368. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  369. Through analysis of composer biographies and data from recording catalogues, this is both an economic and a sociocultural history of classical music composition. The shift from feudal to freelance employment is found to be more gradual than commonly thought: and the thesis that Germany’s political fragmentation supported greater composer employment is rejected. Valuable insights are provided on the importance of copyright, rail transport, and communication technologies in the 19th century for composer careers and musical evolution.
  370. Find this resource:
  371.  
  372. Toynbee, Jason. 2000. Making popular music: Musicians, creativity and institutions. London: Arnold.
  373. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  374. Rather than interpreting creativity as entirely socially constructed and the music industry as purely hegemonic, Toynbee re-articulates the case for understanding musicians as active agents working within a range of “creative possibles.”
  375. Find this resource:
  376.  
  377. Music Consumption
  378.  
  379. Consumption comprises either listening to music or participating in music through attending concerts, playing, or singing. Bourdieu (see Bourdieusian Accounts) occupies a central position in the sociology of music consumption, providing a “hard sociology” approach in his quest to sociologize culture itself and, it has been argued, provide a comprehensive “grand theory” of culture and society (Goldthorpe 2007). Bourdieu argued against the Kantian aesthetic of universal cultural values and objective “good taste”; rather, cultural value emerges via “field struggle.” This incorporates a relational perspective with a more complete treatment of power than preceding sociologists. He also argued that identified cultural consumption as “homologous” with class, particularly in the case of music, and Bourdieu’s Distinction is generally thought to imply that high culture is used by dominant classes to maintain their position with regard to the dominated.
  380.  
  381. Goldthorpe, John. 2007. ‘Cultural capital’: Some critical observations. Sociologica 2:1–23
  382. DOI: 10.2383/24755Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  383. A strong critique of Bourdieu’s conceptualization of cultural capital and grand project of forming a comprehensive theory of social reproduction. Goldthorpe draws distinctions between a “domesticated” middle-range version of the theory, and “Bourdieu wild,” a paradigmatic theory of social inequality and hierarchy that he argues is unscientific.
  384. Find this resource:
  385.  
  386. Bourdieusian Accounts
  387.  
  388. Bourdieu’s work has both dazzled sociologists of culture and been subject to intense critique. It has inspired numerous primary and secondary quantitative analysis projects, including the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion survey of 2003 and Great British Class Survey of 2010–2013 (see Online Sources, Databases, and Data Sets). The investigators adhered as closely as possible to Bourdieu’s conceptual framework and methodological preferences, particularly in the first case, publishing a book largely drawing on multiple correspondence analysis (Bennett, et al. 2009); in the second, they identify seven “cultural classes” in Britain from data on socioeconomic position and lifestyle, including musical taste (Savage, et al. 2013). Findings were surprisingly complex, with the importance of age (or more specifically social generation), gender, and ethnicity highlighted in Bennett, et al. 2009 and the identification of more diverse forms of cultural capital in Savage, et al. 2013. Prior 2011 has noted that adoption of a Bourdieusian approach has enabled a number of scholars to revise traditional historical or sociological accounts of music in society. Nevertheless, Bourdieu’s own attention to the sociology of music itself was a little thin (Prior 2011, p. 127). Goldthorpe has argued that where aspects of Bourdieusian theory are testable, results are more banal than the “grand theory” implies (see Music Consumption). Prior has also noted that “new” sociologists of music are finding more scope in examining the social life of music itself rather than interpreting it simply as a weapon of bourgeois power or outcome of social forces (Prior 2011, p. 133). Bourdieu accordingly clearly matters: class and status differences in cultural consumption continue to be significant, and the question of whether cultural classes exist is an area of vigorous sociological debate. Nevertheless, rejection of homology is too often interpreted alternatively as a wholesale rejection of Bourdieusian insights. A measured view is provided by Prior, who suggests that while Bourdieu’s intellectual project was intellectually imperialist and in need of the re-balance provided by the “aesthetic turn,” it was nevertheless “the most developed, sophisticated and, most importantly, sociological” of those in the sociology of culture (Prior 2011, p. 135).
  389.  
  390. Atkinson, Will. 2011. The context and genesis of musical tastes: Omnivorousness debunked, Bourdieu buttressed. Poetics 39:169–186.
  391. DOI: 10.1016/j.poetic.2011.03.002Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  392. Draws on Bourdieusian theory and interview data on the life histories and lifestyles of fifty-five individuals in Bristol, England. The “musical proclivities” of the advantaged show evidence of conscious discernment and concerted cultivation: aversion to classical music is found among the dominated, and diversity in taste is shown mostly by the upwardly mobile in a manner that could be interpreted as cultural goodwill. Calls for a more nuanced, less categorical approach to testing omnivorism theories.
  393. Find this resource:
  394.  
  395. Bennett, Tony, Mike Savage, Elizabeth Silva, Alan Warde, Modesto Gayo-Cal, and David Wright. 2009. Culture, class, distinction. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
  396. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  397. Reporting analysis of the 2003 Cultural Class and Social Exclusion survey, specifically designed to enable testing of Bourdieusian cultural theories. Quantitative analysis of a number of cultural variables, including music, largely involved multiple correspondence analysis alongside analysis of interview and focus group data. Findings largely consonant with the Bourdieusian framework, extended to take account of ethnicity and gender and their interactions with class, differences between omnivores and univores, participants and nonparticipants, and age effects.
  398. Find this resource:
  399.  
  400. DiMaggio, Paul. 1982. Cultural capital and school success: The impact of status culture participation on the grades of U. S. high school students. American Sociological Review 47.2: 189–201.
  401. DOI: 10.2307/2094962Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  402. An early empirical engagement with Bourdieu. Analyzes high school student test scores using measures of cultural capital from a survey of interest and involvement in music, art, and literature. Measures of cultural capital have large, significant effects on reported grades achieved, comparable for nontechnical subjects with the effect of measured ability. Cultural interests and activities apparently prescribed for girls in particular. Cultural capital apparently less strongly associated with parental background than implied by Bourdieu.
  403. Find this resource:
  404.  
  405. Erickson, Bonnie. 1996. Culture, class, and connections. American Journal of Sociology 102.1: 217–251.
  406. DOI: 10.1086/230912Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  407. While only tangentially concerned with music, this is a highly significant paper analyzing data on cultural repertoires. “Field” is defined as industry, with an analysis of the relationship between cultural knowledge and network variety among 393 private security industry workers in Toronto. Business culture is found to be more important than high culture, but shared culture, particularly sport, does have a role in coordinating effort and “smoothing relationships.”
  408. Find this resource:
  409.  
  410. Prior, Nick. 2011. Critique and renewal in the sociology of music: Bourdieu and beyond. Cultural Sociology 5.1: 121–138.
  411. DOI: 10.1177/1749975510389723Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  412. Prior analyzes the waxing and waning of Bourdieu’s influence in the sociology of music, highlighting a shift toward a renewed sociology of aesthetics typified by Born, DeNora, and Hennion among others. Highlights the dangers of theoretical eclecticism, concluding that the dynamics of academic production may be responsible.
  413. Find this resource:
  414.  
  415. Savage, Mike, Fiona Devine, and Niall Cunningham, et al. 2013. A new model of social class? Findings from the BBC’s Great British Class Survey experiment. Sociology 47.2: 219–250.
  416. DOI: 10.1177/0038038513481128Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  417. Using data from Savage and Devine 2015, this analyzes “cultural classes” incorporating data on liking and disliking of eleven musical genres. A highly impactful article generating much disciplinary and public debate.
  418. Find this resource:
  419.  
  420. Music Consumption and Omnivorousness
  421.  
  422. The discovery of increasing omnivorism in cultural taste by Peterson and Kern (see General Overview) suggested that tastes are less fixed than many Bourdieusians had assumed and that highbrow tastes appear not to demonstrate the rigid rules of exclusion implied by Bourdieu 1984 (cited under General Overviews) but rather a cosmopolitan cultural relativism in which genres are appreciated on their own terms. Some sociologists of music and culture contrast the omnivorousness and homology theses, although a refutation of Bourdieu was not asserted in the original article. Nevertheless, this work has opened up an empirically rich strand of research, with notable examples of the association between occupational prestige, education, and categorical tolerance (Bryson 1996), long-term change in tastes toward increasing eclecticism in the Netherlands (Jaeger and Katz-Gerro 2010), and the rise of “categorical tolerance” via generational replacement in the United States (Lizardo and Skiles 2016).
  423.  
  424. Bryson, Bethany. 1996. “Anything but heavy metal”: Symbolic exclusion and musical dislikes. American Sociological Review 61.5: 884–899.
  425. DOI: 10.2307/2096459Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  426. Argues that omniovorousness in America can be more accurately conceived as generating “multicultural capital” signaling the social prestige associated with familiarity with a range of cultural styles, particularly those that are exclusive. Uses the 1993 General Social Survey to present a set of models of musical dislike, identifying a relationship between cultural taste, political tolerance, and racism: tolerance itself separates high status culture from other group cultures.
  427. Find this resource:
  428.  
  429. Chan, Tak Wing, and John Goldthorpe. 2007. Social stratification and cultural consumption: Music in England. European Sociological Review 23.1: 1–19.
  430. DOI: 10.1093/esr/jcl016Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  431. This paper analyzes music variables—attendance at a classical music concert, an opera, a jazz concert, or pop or rock concert, or listening to recordings in these genres—in the 2001 Arts in England survey. Finds three latent classes in English society: musical univores, omnivore-listeners, and true omnivores. Occupational status has a strong effect on cultural consumption, with education additionally important and class rather less important, which they argue challenges the Bourdieusian “homology” argument that cultural and social stratification are tightly coupled.
  432. Find this resource:
  433.  
  434. Jaeger, Mads Meier, and Tally Katz-Gerro. 2010. The rise of the eclectic cultural consumer in Denmark, 1964–2004. Sociological Quarterly 51.3: 460–483.
  435. DOI: 10.1111/j.1533-8525.2010.01175.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  436. Analysis involves the following variables of attendance and cultural participation over six survey waves, from 1964 to 2004: going to the cinema, a classical concert, the opera, the theater, an art museum or gallery, and newspaper reading. Finds that income, education, and social class are strong predictors of cultural consumption with little evidence that the socioeconomic gradient has become less steep over time.
  437. Find this resource:
  438.  
  439. Lizardo, Omar, and Sara Skiles. 2016. The end of symbolic exclusion? The rise of ‘categorical tolerance’ in the musical tastes of Americans: 1993–2012. Sociological Science 3:85–108.
  440. DOI: 10.15195/v3.a5Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  441. Using a 2012 replication of the 1993 General Social Survey music module, and pooling the two surveys, the analysis identifies a rise in a population group that refuses to use music for symbolic exclusion purposes, theorizing that this is due to generational replacement and increasing racial diversity in the population.
  442. Find this resource:
  443.  
  444. Savage, Mike, and Modesto Gayo-Cal. 2011. Unravelling the omnivore: A field analysis of contemporary musical taste in the United Kingdom. Poetics 39.5: 337–357.
  445. DOI: 10.1016/j.poetic.2011.07.001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  446. Places the omnivorism concept associated with Peterson and Kern in a Bourdieusian field perspective, calling for the intensity and expertise associated with musical knowledge to be fully taken into account. Reports results of multiple correspondence analysis of the CCSE’s items on liking and disliking of both genres and individual works. Identifies six musical clusters in England: classic enthusiasts, the aversive, uninformed, pop-oriented, experts, and pop voracious. Equates middle-class omnivorism with expertise.
  447. Find this resource:
  448.  
  449. van Eijck, Koen. 2001. Social differentiation in musical taste patterns. Social Forces 79.3: 1163–1185.
  450. DOI: 10.1353/sof.2001.0017Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  451. Analysis of Cultural Participation of the Dutch Population 1987 data set, which included items on listening to thirteen music genres. Finds a four-factor structure of listening preferences: folk, highbrow, pop, and “new omnivore.” Education is found to predict taste more strongly than occupational status, while “new omnivorism” appears to be structured generationally: younger social generations have broader cultural repertoires than older social generations.
  452. Find this resource:
  453.  
  454. Sociology of Musical Genre, Musical Classification, and Musical Diversity
  455.  
  456. Numerous sociologists have considered the question of how musical genres are distinguished and classified, particularly with reference to themes of authenticity, sacralization, race and ethnicity, class, and gender, in terms of both musical production and reception. Genre can be understood as a nexus of shared conventions among musical producers and audiences, who collectively identify the genre as salient, have a common understanding regarding its boundaries, and identify themselves with it. DiMaggio 1987 characterized genre as varying in terms of differentiation, institutionalization, prestige, and ritual strength. Peterson 1997 provided a masterful statement on the concept of genre and authenticity through a detailed case study of American country music, from its invention as a genre to the point where it had become recognizable and institutionalized. Lena 2012 proposes that genres exhibit regularities in their trajectories with a conceptually innovative study of sixty genres, identifying common periods of avant garde, scene-based, industry-based and traditionalist co-production. Schmutz, van Venrooij, Janssen, and Verboord in various works examine the evaluation, legitimation, and rise and fall in prominence of popular genres in the elite press of different countries. Silver, et al. 2016 uses network analytic techniques to assess the structure of popular music, analyzing and making available one of the largest available data sets of currently active musicians. The opportunities provided by automatic data extraction of online music data suggest that this area of study will prove particularly fertile and allow further testing and elaboration of DiMaggio, Lena, and Peterson’s key insights. A number of the selections here relate to rap and hip-hop as a relatively young, constantly innovating and commercially successful genre; Rose’s groundbreaking and foundation text places rap at the forefront of hip-hop culture as the most easily commodified expression of that culture.
  457.  
  458. Beer, David. 2013. Genre, boundary drawing and the classificatory imagination. Cultural Sociology 7.2: 145–160.
  459. DOI: 10.1177/1749975512473461Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  460. Critiques field analysis for its rigid understanding of genre and boundary. Argues for the value of understanding everyday classification and “a classificatory imagination.” Uses social media data on discussion of hip-hop in 2012 to illustrate genre fluidity and contestability.
  461. Find this resource:
  462.  
  463. Crossley, Nick, and Rachel Emms. 2016. Mapping the musical universe: A blockmodel of UK music festivals, 2011–2013. Methodological Innovations 9:1–14.
  464. DOI: 10.1177/2059799116630663Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  465. Analyzes the musical acts performing at 106 festivals. Festivals found to be structured as eight blocks: top-tier, second-tier, and third-tier mainstream; metal/punk; folk; retro pop; jazz; and specialist. Identifies patterns of connection between the blocks and the top-tier as the core around which the other more peripheral blocks are organized.
  466. Find this resource:
  467.  
  468. DiMaggio, Paul. 1987. Classification in art. American Sociological Review 52.4: 440–455.
  469. DOI: 10.2307/2095290Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  470. Discusses the processes of categorization in the arts in terms of the sense-making activities of social groups. Societies vary in terms of how far art is differentiated into institutionally bound genres, how far genres are ranked by prestige, how far arts classifications systems are universal, and how far boundaries between genres are ritualized. Uses the evolution of the symphony orchestra in 19th-century Boston and New York as a case study of ritual classification.
  471. Find this resource:
  472.  
  473. Lena, Jennifer C. 2004. Meaning and membership: Samples in rap music, 1979–1995. Poetics 32.3: 297–310.
  474. DOI: 10.1016/j.poetic.2004.05.006Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  475. Analyses 750 samples included in 473 rap songs in the Billboard Top 100 R&B Singles charts, 1979–1995. Argues that music worlds partly serve a valuation function, with valuation partly determined in this case by the types of sample used, including the rarity and opacity of the sources and their amenability to sampling. Valuations aid artists in signaling their identity and connections within the subgenre.
  476. Find this resource:
  477.  
  478. Lena, Jennifer C. 2012. Banding together: How communities create genres in popular music. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
  479. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  480. Lena examines sixty genres, from bluegrass to death metal, suggesting that genres arise from avant garde, scene-based, industry-based, or traditionalist collective action—and further that the trajectories of genres involving passing through each distinct stage of such action. In some contexts, government intervention could also shape genre.
  481. Find this resource:
  482.  
  483. Negus, Keith. 2013. Music genres and corporate cultures. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
  484. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  485. A wide-ranging study built on the assumption that industry produces culture but culture also produces industry—with specific application to genre cultures. Investigates rap, salsa, and country music. Investigates genre rules and conventions in terms of social tensions and divisions as much as collaboration and community.
  486. Find this resource:
  487.  
  488. Peterson, Richard A. 1997. Creating country music: Fabricating authenticity. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
  489. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  490. A study of the evolution of the country music genre between 1923 and 1953, during which the conventions of what constitutes country music authenticity and originality had been established, the audience identified, and the country music industry institutionalized. Analyzes the performance and songwriting conventions defining the genre. A major study of country music that has influenced the study of the genre more broadly. Has been hailed as a masterpiece.
  491. Find this resource:
  492.  
  493. Rose, Tricia. 1994. Black noise: Rap music and black culture in contemporary America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press.
  494. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  495. Developed from the first American PhD dissertation on hip-hop, this interdisciplinary study provides a detailed history of the genre, the cultural production of rap, rap as a musical form, the cultural politics of rap, and rap and gender. An essential text on rap as a genre, hip-hop as a social movement, and American popular culture more broadly.
  496. Find this resource:
  497.  
  498. Schmutz, Vaughn, Alex van Venrooij, Susanne Janssen, and Marc Verboord. 2010. Change and continuity in newspaper coverage of popular music since 1955: Evidence from the United States, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Popular Music and Society 33.4: 501–515.
  499. DOI: 10.1080/03007761003694290Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  500. Detailed content analysis of music coverage in elite newspapers in cross-national and historical context. The authors find increasing legitimacy of popular music over time in all four countries, particularly for the United States and Netherlands, less so in Germany. Some convergence in the global market of popular music is identified, with interesting differences by genre found (rap is more central in the United States; heavy metal is hardly represented) and low representation of female musicians noted.
  501. Find this resource:
  502.  
  503. Silver, Daniel, Monica Lee, and C. Clayton Childress. 2016. Genre complexes in popular music. PLOS ONE 11.5: e0155471.
  504. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0155471Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  505. Uses data scraped from nearly 3 million artists’ MySpace profiles in 2007 from artists’ selection of up to three of 122 genres. Identifies sixteen distinct communities within three meso-level genre complexes: rock, hip-hop, and “niche.” Rock exhibits high boundary strength and high differentiation; hip-hop exhibits high boundaries, low differentiation, and a single center; and the niche world low boundary and high differentiation with no center. Argues against the thesis that genre is in “decline.”
  506. Find this resource:
  507.  
  508. Van Renrooij, Alex, and Vaughn Schmutz. 2010. The evaluation of popular music in the United States, Germany and the Netherlands: A comparison of the use of high art and popular aesthetic criteria. Cultural Sociology 4.3: 395–421.
  509. DOI: 10.1177/1749975510385444Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  510. Intriguing quantitative content analysis of album reviews in the elite American, German, and Dutch press. Finds that German newspapers are more likely to draw on high art criteria and American and Dutch critics on the popular aesthetic.
  511. Find this resource:
  512.  
  513. Sociology of Popular Music
  514.  
  515. The sociology of popular music forms a distinct cluster within the subdiscipline and usually taken to involve commercially recorded, non-art music, primarily rock and pop; however, artists in jazz, folk, classical music, or world music do occasionally achieve serious commercial success (see Sociology of Less Commercial Music). Popular music studies has had a strong British presence from the mid-1970s, influenced by the “critical political economy” tradition. The contribution of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham is notable here: especially active in the 1970s, a number of researchers investigated distinct music subcultures in terms of resistance (see Hebdige 1979 in particular), with distinct subcultures co-created by working-class youth as a response to economic exploitation, social domination, and alienation. With the proliferation of pop and rock music now decades old, the social generations first exposed to music-oriented youth culture have aged, and the tight coupling of the sociology of youth and sociology of popular music has unwound (Bennett 2013, Hesmondhalgh 2005). Equally, scholars such as Thornton have rejected the conflation of subcultural participation with class (Thornton 1995). Moreover, scholarly interest in the sociology of popular music reception and evaluation has grown enormously, with Frith 1996 arguing that the essence of popular music is evaluation and discussion, which such practices requiring sociological analysis to be fully understood. With the blurring of the boundary between commercial and amateur music, questions of “everyday practice” and music practice as lifestyle are of increasing interest in popular music studies, with Cohen’s study of the Liverpool rock world an exemplar (Cohen 1991). With an explicit focus on the sociology of everyday life, Kotarba, et al. 2013 provides a symbolic interactionist account of American popular music.
  516.  
  517. Bennett, Andy. 2013. Music, style and aging, Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press.
  518. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  519. An important recent contribution to the study of music subcultures, hitherto generally conceived heavily in terms of youth culture. The study demonstrates that rather being strictly associated with youth, participation in music worlds continues to define the identities and everyday lives of many music lovers even after entry to adulthood, through middle age, and beyond.
  520. Find this resource:
  521.  
  522. Cohen, Sara. 1991. Rock culture in Liverpool. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
  523. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  524. Ethnographic study of rock musicians working in an intensely competitive and factionalized local music scene, exploring tensions between creativity and commerce. Insightful in its focus on cultural production and on the everyday practice of unsigned artists, reaffirming the value of the terms “art world” and “musical world” to describe their operation.
  525. Find this resource:
  526.  
  527. Frith, Simon. 1996. Performing rites: On the value of popular music. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
  528. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  529. A highly central text in the sociology of popular music, one drawing eclectically from many disciplines. Argues that music has particular value because of its importance for self-expression and that debate and discussion of musical value is fundamental to popular culture. Draws from different intellectual traditions, from symbolic interactionism to Marxism, to assess the changing relationship between class and popular music.
  530. Find this resource:
  531.  
  532. Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The meaning of style. London: Methuen.
  533. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  534. Influential book in the Birmingham CCCS tradition, focusing more heavily on how subcultures—generally music centered—were associated with particular ethnic identities as well as working-class youth resistance. Pays particular attention to the case of punk and white working-class youth alongside an extensive survey of postwar youth culture.
  535. Find this resource:
  536.  
  537. Hesmondhalgh, David. 2005. Subcultures, scenes or tribes? None of the above. Journal of Youth Studies 8.1: 21–40.
  538. DOI: 10.1080/13676260500063652Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  539. Critiques “subcultural” analysis of music participation as excessively youth focused. Rejects the concept of “scene” as imprecise and argues instead for the concept of “genre” as an organizing concept for the understanding of “musical collectivities.”
  540. Find this resource:
  541.  
  542. Kotarba, Joe, Bryce Merrill, J. Patrick Williams, and Phillip Vannini. 2013. Understanding society through popular music. New York: Routledge.
  543. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  544. Written for undergraduates, this provides a lively introduction to the sociology of popular music and sociology more broadly via popular music. Music is explored in relation to identity, deviance, race, class, gender, technology, and politics.
  545. Find this resource:
  546.  
  547. Marshall, Lee. 2011. The sociology of popular music, interdisciplinarity and aesthetic autonomy. British Journal of Sociology 62.1: 154–174.
  548. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2010.01353.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  549. An overview of the state of the sociology of popular music, noting ghettoization between substantive areas in sociology, with the sociology of popular music a particular example. While interdisciplinarity has had advantages, Marshall argues the field has also suffered recently from being divorced from mainstream sociology and the dominance of cultural studies. Marshall calls for more attention to a “materialist sociology of music” using sociological concepts and methods.
  550. Find this resource:
  551.  
  552. Regev, Motti, and Edwin Seroussi. 2004. Popular music and national culture in Israel. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
  553. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  554. An exhaustive survey of popular music in Israel combining sociological and ethnomethodological expertise. Popular music was effectively part of Israel’s national project. The contexts and forces driving the emergence of “Songs of the Land of Israel” (Israeli folk), Israeli rock, and the eastern Mediterranean pop known as musiqa mizrahit are analyzed in immersive detail: an important case study of how political, ethno-national, and cultural factors combine to create and shape new popular genres.
  555. Find this resource:
  556.  
  557. Santoro, Marco. 2002. What is a “cantautore?” Distinction and authorship in Italian (popular) music. Poetics 30.1–2: 111–132.
  558. DOI: 10.1016/S0304-422X(02)00002-5Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  559. A notable sociohistorical and Bourdieusian analysis of the evolution of a new genre and the processes by which it was co-created by the music industry (which coined the term “cantautore”) and predominantly urban, middle-class musicians who set themselves apart from the commercial light musicians hitherto dominant in Italian popular music.
  560. Find this resource:
  561.  
  562. Thornton, Sarah. 1995. Club cultures: Music, media and sub-cultural capital. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
  563. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  564. Adapts Bourdieusian concepts to analyze the British dance scene as primarily a taste culture formed through interactions between dancers, venues, and the media, both niche music media and (through negative coverage) mass media. Introduces the concept of subcultural capital to theorize on the evaluation of music and dance made by scene participants, and particularly their valorization of distance from the mainstream.
  565. Find this resource:
  566.  
  567. Sociology of Less Commercial Music
  568.  
  569. Most highly skilled musicians perform for little money as amateurs and semi-professionals. Equally, a number of musical forms have a strong cultural presence but only cover a fraction of costs through ticket sales or recordings. These forms and practices are considered here as “less commercial music” depending heavily on extra-market support or having a major amateur element. While not purely uncommercial, serious classical music is often analyzed as a case par excellence of state- or elite-subsidized performing arts. Classical music is dominated by the 1750–1900 classical and romantic repertoires, which adapted to the demands of musical patrons in the shape of European princes, nobility, and bourgeois audiences; DeNora 1995 provides an excellent case study. Jazz first emerged at the turn of the 20th century as a largely African American folk music for which there was a ready market to accompany social dances; over the course of the 20th century it became an art music through the evolution of modernist, bebop, and avant garde forms; the rise of the college circuit and subsidized festival as markets; and the decline of the social dance market for musicians in favor of the DJ. The essence of jazz is improvised performance, with the micro-mechanisms making this possible analyzed thoroughly by Faulkner and Becker 2009. Folk music has been fostered within families, through private folk and dance societies, and (beginning in the 1960s) the folk club and festival (Boyes 1993). A generally left-oriented political mission has additionally served to sacralize and bind the movement (Eyerman and Jamieson 1998). While some musicians do enjoy commercial success, folk typifies the amateur ethos, with amateur musical practice more broadly involving substantial investment of time and resources. Such serious leisure has been theorized by Stebbins 1992 (the author of which was originally a sociologist of jazz), while Finnegan 1989 is a significant ethnography of music in Milton Keynes, providing rich examples. At the furthest extreme from the commercial mainstream is “outsider music”: this is music with a claim to art status created by those with few or no ties to existing music worlds (Chusid 2000).
  570.  
  571. Born, Georgina. 1995. Rationalizing culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the institutionalization of the musical avant-garde. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
  572. DOI: 10.1525/california/9780520202160.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  573. A participant observation study of IRCAM, a research institute for acoustics and avant garde composition established by Pierre Boulez. The study was conducted by the musicologist Georgina Born during a period of institutional crisis. She explores questions of artistic value and how changing political capital and commercial pressure determined the institute’s trajectory during the 1980s up to and just after Boulez’s retirement.
  574. Find this resource:
  575.  
  576. Boyes, Georgina. 1993. The imagined village: Culture, ideology and the English folk revival. Manchester, UK: Manchester Univ. Press.
  577. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  578. The first academic monograph on the English folk revival, providing an overview of English folk music, dance, and song over the 20th century. Folklorist Boyes draws heavily on archival sources to deconstruct the ideology of “the Folk” and of authenticity in English folk music.
  579. Find this resource:
  580.  
  581. Chusid, Irwin. 2000. Songs in the key of Z: The curious universe of outsider music. Chicago: A Capella.
  582. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  583. Not an academic text but nevertheless a carefully researched contribution by the world’s foremost authority on outsider music, with a claim to having coined the term. Includes case studies of isolated artists and works on the extreme margins.
  584. Find this resource:
  585.  
  586. DeNora, Tia. 1995. Beethoven and the construction of genius: Musical politics in Vienna, 1792–1803. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
  587. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  588. A sophisticated analysis of both the social function of taste and the production of art. Provides empirical depth via archival and documentary sources, examining Beethoven’s career as a specific historical case. Analyzes the evolution of patronage as an organizational form to explain how works become canonic, traditions are invented, and connoisseurship becomes a recognizable cultural practice. Also revises the traditional wisdom that innovative works are the necessary and sufficient cause of success.
  589. Find this resource:
  590.  
  591. Eyerman, Ron, and Andrew Jamieson. 1998. Music and social movements: Mobilizing traditions in the twentieth century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  592. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511628139Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  593. An overview of the cultural manifestations of postwar social movements in the United States and Sweden, suggesting that music and culture is inextricable from new political movements. Particular attention paid to figures such as the Lomaxes, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, as well as black music and traditional Scandinavian music and folk music in Swedish “progressive” life from the 1960s.
  594. Find this resource:
  595.  
  596. Faulkner, Robert R., and Howard S. Becker. 2009. “Do you know. . .?”: The jazz repertoire in action. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
  597. DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226239224.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  598. Excellent, jargon-light sociology of “everyday” live jazz. Both professional musicians, Faulkner and Becker combine autoethnography with analysis of qualitative interviews. Also focuses on the strategies adopted by ordinary jazz musicians over the postwar period to perform to a professional standard as the live jazz market evolved.
  599. Find this resource:
  600.  
  601. Finnegan, Ruth. 1989. The hidden musicians: Music-making in an English town. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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  603. Ethnography of musical life in Milton Keynes over four years in the 1980s, drawing on Finnegan’s own participation in local amateur music groups. Focusing on seven separate “worlds”—classical, brass band, folk, musical drama, jazz, country, and rock and pop—Finnegan documents the richness of activity in an ostensibly sterile British “new town.” Shows the time and resources devoted by amateur musicians to their art. A landmark qualitative study for its range and empirical detail.
  604. Find this resource:
  605.  
  606. McCormick, Lisa. 2015. Performing civility: International competitions in classical music. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  607. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781316181478Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  608. Applies a performance and performativity perspective to music via a multimethod study of interview, archival, and digital sources. Civility is presented in terms of community building and a celebration of transparency and fairness, perhaps necessary because of the highly competitive nature of classical music where talent is not rare. The proliferation of competitions is discussed in terms of ranking emerging musicians, award of esteem, and control of the distribution of symbolic power.
  609. Find this resource:
  610.  
  611. Roy, William G. 2010. Reds, whites, and blues: Social movements, folk music, and race in the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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  613. Interprets music as a product of and intrinsic to social movements in that social movements mobilize around culture. Compares folk associated with “Old Left” movements of the 1930s and 1940s, and civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s: the former a largely cultural movement, the latter incorporating music into collective political action. Demonstrates that the power of music lies less in its sonic qualities than in the social relationships within which it is embedded.
  614. Find this resource:
  615.  
  616. Stebbins, Robert A. 1992. Amateurs, professionals, and serious leisure. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press.
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  618. A comprehensive account of the serious leisure perspective, involving close study of eight different types of leisure, including music. Draws on Stebbins’s experience as a serious amateur musician as well as extensive study in the 1970s of some two hundred amateur musicians. Presented as a formal grounded theory of amateur practice.
  619. Find this resource:
  620.  
  621. Music and the “Art Worlds” Perspective
  622.  
  623. A distinct strand of the sociology of music focuses on music as the outcome of an inherently social and collaborative process, with a particular intellectual debt to Howard Becker. His “art worlds” perspective and analysis was informed by his experience as a performing jazz musician; he provided the discipline with the insight that art is co-produced by participants and producers and that there is sociological value in empirical investigation of the routine aspects of music—the journeymen as much as the stars. Music is co-produced not only by artists working with support personnel but also by producers and audiences collaborating to define a genre or sound, “break” an artist, or create a particular “scene.” This strand is more focused on supply-side factors albeit with attention to the role of consumers in co-creating music. Various empirical strategies are employed by researchers in this tradition, from ethnographic to quantitative methods. The techniques of social network analysis are increasingly employed to examine production (Crossley 2009) and reception (Lizardo 2006; Lewis, et al. 2008), and to bridge qualitative and quantitative perspectives. There is considerable overlap with the study of musical subcultures where scholars employ concepts of “scene,” “field,” or indeed “subculture” itself, heavily represented in the sociology of popular music; Bottero and Crossley argue that these could be more generally specified in terms of “world” after Becker. With born-digital data increasingly available via the SoundCloud and Spotify APIs (see also Online Sources, Databases, and Data Sets), the opportunities for network analysis of relational music data are increasing rapidly; Allington, et al. 2015 provides a notable example. Social media, more broadly, are presenting enormous opportunities to social scientists given the volume and detail of sociologically relevant data provided online, including via music forums, Twitter and YouTube, offering a rich source of musically relevant data that is only just beginning to be mined by academics.
  624.  
  625. Allington, Daniel, Byron Dueck, and Anna Jordanous. 2015. Networks of value in electronic music: SoundCloud, London, and the importance of place. Cultural Trends 24.3: 211–222.
  626. DOI: 10.1080/09548963.2015.1066073Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  627. Analysis of interview data with electronic dance musicians in combination with network analysis of data scraped from the SoundCloud audio-sharing website. The interviews suggested that music tends to be valued more highly if associated with particular offline venues and gentrifying parts of London; the network analysis revealed central cities with large cultural economies and a strong association with electronic dance music, with London, New York and Los Angeles most central.
  628. Find this resource:
  629.  
  630. Becker, Howard S. 1951. The professional dance musician and his audience. American Journal of Sociology 57.2: 136–144.
  631. DOI: 10.1086/220913Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  632. Based on interviewing and participant-observation, this is an account of how professional musicians define themselves in opposition to “squares”: as gifted, discriminating in taste, and more exciting. A secondary theme was the difficulty of the professional musician’s lifestyle, involving unstable careers, low prestige, and audiences largely indifferent to musical quality.
  633. Find this resource:
  634.  
  635. Bottero, Wendy, and Nick Crossley. 2009. Worlds, fields and networks: Becker, Bourdieu and the structures of social relations. Cultural Sociology 5.1: 99–119.
  636. DOI: 10.1177/1749975510389726Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  637. A critical assessment of Bourdieu’s concept of “field” and Becker’s of “art world,” arguing that both are underdeveloped, illustrating their argument with examples of punk and post-punk networks in London and Manchester. Argues in favor of an interactionist, relational concept of “world,” and empirical analysis of ties and interactions using the techniques of social network analysis.
  638. Find this resource:
  639.  
  640. Crossley, Nick. 2009. The man whose web expanded: Network dynamics in Manchester’s post-punk music scene 1976–1980. Poetics 37.1: 24–49.
  641. DOI: 10.1016/j.poetic.2008.10.002Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  642. A network analysis of punk and post-punk in Manchester to 1980, using data from archival, online, and authoritative historical sources. Identifies the processes whereby a critical mass of punk was formed in Manchester. The analysis is preceded by an extensive discussion of the relative strengths of Beckerian, Bourdieusian, and network analytic approaches to the study of music.
  643. Find this resource:
  644.  
  645. Crossley, Nick. 2014. Networks of sound, style and subversion: The punk and post-punk musical worlds of Manchester, London, Liverpool and Sheffield 1976–1980. Manchester, UK: Manchester Univ. Press.
  646. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  647. A significant methodological advance for the sociology of subcultural music in Britain, this provides both a detailed review of the sociology of punk and presents new analyses of rich archival and documentary source material on English punk and post-punk. Employs social network analysis to uncover the mechanisms whereby punk was born and diffused throughout the four case cities.
  648. Find this resource:
  649.  
  650. Lewis, Kevin, Jason Kaufman, Marco Gonzalez, Andreas Wimmer, and Nicholas Christakis. 2008. Tastes, ties and time. Social Networks 30:330–342.
  651. DOI: 10.1016/j.socnet.2008.07.002Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  652. Raised ethical questions about online research methods due to harvesting of Facebook data on an entire university year group. Nevertheless, it made important findings in a study of how cultural tastes related to tie formation using a longitudinal perspective, as well as insights into the value of social media site data for studying cultural preferences. While tastes were highly individualistic, shared taste did appear to predict choosing to live in the same housing group, implying cultural selection in friendship.
  653. Find this resource:
  654.  
  655. Lizardo, Omar. 2006. How cultural tastes shape personal networks. American Sociological Review 71:778–807.
  656. DOI: 10.1177/000312240607100504Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  657. Drawing on US General Social Survey 2002 data regarding ego-networks and a range of cultural taste indicators including popular music, classical concert, and opera attendance. Draws on Bourdieusian theory to interpret the relationship between cultural and social capital. Popular culture consumption assists with maintaining weaker ties and high culture consumption with denser networks of strong ties. Theorizes that cultural consumption is a primary means whereby individuals become integrated into the social structure.
  658. Find this resource:
  659.  
  660. Mark, Noah. 1998. Birds of a feather sing together. Social Forces 77.2: 453–485.
  661. DOI: 10.1093/sf/77.2.453Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  662. Makes the unusual argument that musical forms compete for audiences as “resource spaces” rather than focusing on individuals having tastes. Extends an ecological approach to theorize the transmission of tastes through homophilous network ties and tests theory using eighteen musical preference measures from the 1993 General Social Survey.
  663. Find this resource:
  664.  
  665. Sociology of Music and Cultural Economics
  666.  
  667. The relationship between economics and sociology is uneasy: sociologists consider traditional rational choice theory to be unrealistic and generally reject methodological individualism. However, cultural economists share common interests with sociologists of music, particularly in the area of evaluation, employ similar methods to quantitative sociologists, and disciplinary interchange is apparent in both directions. Both also inform the formation and analysis of cultural policy. Bourdieu’s conception of cultural capital can be contrasted usefully with Gary Becker’s theories of human and consumption capital, the latter concept implying that an accumulated stock of knowledge about goods’ characteristics provides utility. Indeed, Bourdieu 1986 cited Becker’s earlier work on human capital in “The Forms of Capital” but was critical of its “economism.” Becker’s conception of consumption capital derived from his work on human capital, the stock of knowledge and skills individuals invest in to generate a future stream of income. An individual’s knowledge about the quality of a good and the utility it will generate can increase the utility gained; furthermore, this knowledge itself increases with consumption. Accordingly, consumption depends on previous experience. Moreover, individuals may choose rationally to become addicted to a given cultural experience and thereby cultivate taste and preference in a concerted manner: the rational addiction theory (Becker and Murphy 1988). This is complementary to the insights of thinkers such as Hennion who stress the agency of the music lover. It is known that Becker and Bourdieu discussed the similarity between their concepts of human and cultural capital through personal communication (Throsby 1999, p. 11) although Becker did not do so formally; and in Becker 1996 ideas about social relationships and consumption are developed further. Throsby’s wider body of work (e.g., Throsby 2001) pays attention to the “irreducibly social” aspects of culture, uniting sociological and economic approaches to music.
  668.  
  669. Becker, Gary. 1996. Accounting for tastes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
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  671. Becker’s creativity in applying economics to social and cultural life is exemplified in this text, which summarizes and extends his work on consumption. Taste is theorized as essentially stable. Past experience and social influence determine human and social capital, which together with time, price, and information determine the ability to draw utility from different groups. A model of rational addiction for music is presented to explain why music appreciation increases with consumption: not because an individual’s own tastes shift but rather because their increased knowledge makes the “shadow price” of music “cheaper.”
  672. Find this resource:
  673.  
  674. Becker, Gary, and Kevin Murphy. 1988. A theory of rational addiction. Journal of Political Economy 96:675–700.
  675. DOI: 10.1086/261558Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  676. An influential text in the economics of consumer behavior. Rationality is here conceived as a consistent plan to maximize utility over time. This is elaborated to explain why consumption may vary radically between individuals, binges, abstentions, and the decision to go “cold turkey.” Music is cited as an example of an addictive good.
  677. Find this resource:
  678.  
  679. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. The forms of capital. In Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education. Edited by John G. Richardson, 241–258. New York: Greenwood.
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  681. Central to the study of social and cultural capital. Notable because of its critical citation of Becker’s model of human capital and contrasting conception of how economic, social, and cultural capital relate to each other.
  682. Find this resource:
  683.  
  684. Stigler, George, and Gary Becker. 1977. De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum. American Economic Review 67.2: 76–90.
  685. DOI: 10.2307/1807222Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  686. Stigler and Becker’s theories of rational addiction and consumption capital are critical for economic sociological conceptions of music appreciation. Provides a framework whereby musical taste itself does not change, but the ability to enjoy music increases with exposure. Critical as a neoclassical economic contribution to understanding music consumption: with music prone to fads and tribalism, and where social norms are apparently sovereign, this study accounts for how music consumption can nevertheless be grounded in individual preferences.
  687. Find this resource:
  688.  
  689. Throsby, David. 1999. Cultural capital. Journal of Cultural Economics 23.1: 3–12.
  690. DOI: 10.1023/A:1007543313370Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  691. Usefully bridging cultural economics and the sociology of culture, Throsby notes the inattention in the economic literature to Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital. He also notes that sociologists’ usage equates to economists’ use of the term “human capital” and argues that rather than being embodied according to Bourdieu’s conceptualization, cultural capital can be conceived as the stock of cultural value embodied in an asset. Concludes that a well-defined, operationalizable concept of cultural capital would be of value for cultural policy-makers.
  692. Find this resource:
  693.  
  694. Throsby, David. 2001. Economics and culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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  696. A monograph-length treatment of cultural economics and the question of cultural value that also addresses the question of how culture and economics are related to each other. Also looks at the cultural foundations of the economy and the economic aspects of cultural organization.
  697. Find this resource:
  698.  
  699. Towse, Ruth. 2011. A handbook of cultural economics. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.
  700. DOI: 10.4337/9780857930576Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  701. Among sixty-one chapters by leading cultural economists, this includes entries on the anthropology of art, the sociology of art, and the value of culture. An accessible collection of interest to cultural economists, cultural policy scholars, cultural policymakers, and social scientists of the arts in general. Chapters on music pictures, opera, and orchestras will also be of additional interest to sociologists of music.
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